‘Catch A Fire’ ignites filmmaker’s memories of anti-apartheid dad

Shawn Slovo remembers how her Jewish parents, African National Congress activists, left home in the middle of the night to attend secret meetings. She recalls police regularly raiding their Johannesburg house and arresting her mother and father. All the while, she said, she resented "having to share my parents with a cause much greater than myself."

Slovo grew up to become a screenwriter who honored her parents (and exorcised childhood demons) through her movies.

After her mother, Ruth First, was assassinated by a parcel bomb in the early 1980s, she wrote "A World Apart" (1988) about their volatile mother-daughter relationship.

When her father, Joe Slovo, who was chief of staff of the ANC's military wing, described the black freedom fighter Patrick Chamusso, she penned "Catch a Fire," which opens Oct. 27.

If "A World Apart" is a tribute to the writer's mother, "Fire" salutes her father -- albeit indirectly -- who died in 1995.
The thriller recounts how Chamusso, a foreman at South Africa's Secunda oil refinery, remained apolitical until he was falsely accused of bombing a section of the refinery. After he and his wife were brutally interrogated and tortured, the African became politicized and left his home near the factory to offer his services to Joe Slovo's guerilla unit in Mozambique. Using his inside knowledge, he told the guerillas he could raze the coal-to-oil refinery and keep it burning for days. With Slovo he created his plan to sneak back over the border, with mines strapped to his body, to furtively enter the factory on a coal conveyor belt. Chamusso only partially succeeded in his mission; he was arrested six days later and spent 10 years in prison on Robben Island. But his solo act raised morale among blacks struggling to overthrow the apartheid regime.

"It sums up the spirit of Joe," Slovo's younger sister, Robyn, the film's producer, said in a telephone interview.

Although Joe Slovo was one of ANC's top leaders and a close friend of Nelson Mandela, "he was a man who more than anything was interested in ordinary people," the producer said. "And Patrick Chamusso was an ordinary working man who was completely uninterested in politics until he was terrorized into action."

The producer denies that Chamusso was a terrorist, or that "Fire" glorifies terrorism.

"There's nothing equivalent in Patrick's actions and events taking place in the world today," she said. "Our film is about the struggle of a man to achieve the right to vote, and democracy in a police state that ran on race lines. It's much more like the American War of Independence than the suicide bombings in the Middle East."

Shawn Slovo believes the movie, directed by Phillip Noyce ("Clear and Present Danger"), ties in to a filmmaking trend that would have pleased her father: The telling of an African story from the perspective of a black man rather than a white outsider (her father appears only briefly in the movie). Hollywood studios have released a number of such films this year, including Kevin MacDonald's recent "The Last King of Scotland," about Idi Amin. "Fire" has earned mostly good reviews, including one from the Canadian magazine Macleans, saying it "is certain to generate serious heat at the Oscars."

For the screenwriter, the film is much more than an African espionage drama.

"The parallel for me is the way in which the political affects the personal, and how apartheid shattered and destroyed family life," she said. "My engagement with the characters and the history has to do with my past, and my family's past."

In 1934, the 8-year-old Joe (born Yossel) Slovo immigrated to South Africa to escape pogroms in his native Lithuania. Four years later, he was forced to abandon school to help support his impoverished family, taking a factory job, which was where he first learned of the wage disparity between blacks and whites. He was further politicized while discussing Marxist politics with fellow Jewish immigrants who shared his ramshackle boarding house.

By age 16 he had joined the South African Communist Party and rejected Zionism in favor of his own country's liberation movement. Even so, he considered himself "100 percent Jewish" and linked his work to the historical Jewish struggle for social justice, Robyn Slovo said.

At law school, he met First, daughter of Russian Jewish communists, and Nelson Mandela, with whom he helped found the ANC's military wing in 1961. Slovo was abroad, two years later, when Mandela and others were arrested and sentenced to life in prison at Robben Island.
Shawn was 13 that year, and she was desperate for her parents' attention as her father vanished into exile; in retaliation for his disappearance, First was arrested and placed in solitary confinement, where she attempted suicide to avoid cracking under psychological torture. With her father labeled South Africa's most wanted man and "Public Enemy No. 1," Shawn was taunted at school, where even her Jewish best friend ostracized her. (Robyn and another sister were hounded as well.)

"A 13-year-old doesn't understand politics; she just wants her parents," the screenwriter said. "But I also felt guilty, because how could I complain about their absence when they were fighting for the liberation of 28 million blacks?"

After her mother's suicide attempt, the family was allowed to immigrate to England, where Shawn Slovo insisted upon attending boarding school because she felt unsafe at home.

"It was also a rebellion, a reaction to the past turbulence," she said. She entered the film business because "it was as far away from my parents' work as I could get."

During the rest of her childhood, Joe Slovo was mostly abroad in ANC training camps, reachable only through an intermediary or a fake name and address.

In the early 1980s, when she was in her 30s, she began to confront her parents about their devotion to politics over family. Joe declined to answer her questions, in his avuncular, matter-of-fact way: "His response was always, 'This was in the past, let's put it behind us and move forward,'" the screenwriter recalled.
"But Ruth was much more willing to acknowledge the issues we might have had about our upbringing, perhaps because she was more central and concerned in her motherly role."

Mother and daughter were forging a rapprochement when Shawn received a call telling her that First had been murdered on Aug. 17, 1982.

"I was absolutely shocked, because all those years I had been emotionally preparing myself that the call would come about Joe," the screenwriter said.

Her response was to write "A World Apart," which essentially finished the dialogue that the author and her mother did not complete in real life. The early drafts were "messy and self-pitying," she recalled, but her father helped by suggesting that she end the film with the funeral of a black activist, in order to put the family story into its proper perspective.

While she still was angry with her father, she felt she had earned his respect, "as more of an equal," when the film earned rave reviews in 1988.

The feeling was enhanced when she began working on "Catch a Fire" in 1991, two weeks after Chamusso was released from prison. Her father had arranged the meeting but was unable to attend because he was busy negotiating South Africa's transition government with Mandela.

So why hasn't the screenwriter confronted her father in a screenplay?
"Men tend to get off easier in film and in life," she said.

Shawn Slovo is sad that he did not live to see the film; Joe Slovo died of bone marrow cancer at age 68 in 1995, and some 30,000 blacks turned out for his funeral. His dedication to "ordinary" people like Patrick Chamusso is reflected in how he is remembered in South Africa.

"It's not airports and stadiums that are named for him, but squatters' shacks, shantytowns and one-room schoolhouses," the screenwriter said.

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